TILT

Stories are effective teaching tools. They show how context can mislead people to make wrong decisions. Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn’t recognized before and highlight the unexpected, resourceful ways in which people have solved problems.

Dan & Chip Heath, Made to Stick

When we teach we tell stories about the world. Some are scientific, some historical, some philosophical, and so on.

Jo Ann Pagano, “Moral Fictions”
in The Stories Lives Tell: Using Narrative in Education

Telling Stories?

If I’m to engage you in thinking about ways in which Telling Stories can be integral to sticky learning through teaching that sticks…

Do I open here by telling the story about an advocate of engaged learning – now 30 years into a career combining teaching (undergraduate and graduate courses) and professional development leadership – who twice, as that person recalls, dropped an undergraduate course because it included group testing components?

Or do you think I might do better starting out with the story about the person who earned a second masters degree and a doctorate after failing two of four components for the required written exams of a first masters degree?

Maybe I could tell a “science leaver’s” story – the one about being told to stop asking “soft side” questions so the class could focus on the technical questions that would be on the exam.

Perhaps the stories can wait. Let’s start by setting out how I – the one who avoided group testing, who failed two of four segments in an English masters degree, who asked context and communication questions rather than technical one in my college biology and math courses – have come to use, to mean, story here.

Narrative

What happened – the organized, even plotted, linking together of information, ideas and insights, this is narrative. At least for the purposes of this posting. Humans shape initial meanings by creating a narrative, making decisions about what information links together, whether elements of what we’ve observed and believed will remain or be remade or be relinquished in what we have come to know. Piecing together a narrative helps us to reflect on which ideas now “make sense.” A narrative exemplifies one of Mark Twain’s rules of writing: it accomplishes something and arrives somewhere.

To be frank, narrative as a rhetorical form tends to elicit the same response from me as the five-paragraph theme in school writing, the inverted pyramid in journalism, and the sage on the stage in public or classroom lectures: I know my brain goes wandering shortly after the opener, too often I am wrestling with one bit of information in the midst of the many assembled to support an idea – caught on the wrong side of the buttress: outside the lecture, the buttress a wall between the narrative and my own brain aiming to make sense of things.

You’ve been there, too – as speaker and as listener – wondering not just “What did I miss?” You, too, have listed each gathered What hoping to discover a What? – some sort of stimulating and simulating question around which to build a story inviting you to think along with, because of, with, for, through, after which, in order to – to formulate ideas as you parse and synthesize information.

Narrative sets out how an “I” thinks. Narratives belong primarily to those telling. Narratives do exemplify the simple and concrete principles by selecting and ordering information.

Story

Story – story builds from narrative, incorporates “the perspective of someone’s life and in the context of someone’s emotions” (Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education, 32). Story, from this perspective, invigorates the rich study and contexts the remarkable passion we bring to what we research and teach.

Story engages cognitive and affective, word and image, storyteller and listener, context-setting and meaning-making. Stories can become bridges between what the Heaths call “The Curse of Knowledge” (when we as teachers forget, or opt to not remember, what it’s like to not know) and what I call “The Curse of Not Knowing” (when we as students or teachers are afraid of risking the necessary tactile and powerful affective encounters with what we don’t know).

Stories are not always personal, as in coming from one’s own life – they may come from headlines, from parables, from novels or movies or comics or blogs currently being read locally, nationally, internationally across generations. And stories are always personal, as in resonating personally with people, so that in listening we are stimulated to consider, and in that move through picturing how ideas come together into simulating – rehearsing, enacting as we think – those specifics in making sense of an abstract. Stories drawn from headlines or from our own lives range in size and depth from small slivers to strands of experiences to larger chunks, each offering opportunities for listeners to lean and learn into the course content as stories stimulate and simulate thinking.

Engaging in story making – as tellers/speakers and as listeners/interpreters – is about learning.

James Zull points out that the brain requires pillars of data gathering, creating, reflecting and testing in order to do the work of learning: to sort, connect, retain, organize, reject, integrate information. There is a biological story in that process.

Stephen Brookfield schematizes adult learning as a process building upon four capacities: dialectical/dialogical thinking, engagement in practical logic, attending to meta-cognition, and reflection rich in perspective taking. There is a social cultural story in that process.

Frank Coffield defines learning as involving “significant changes in capability, understanding, knowledge, practices, attitudes or values by individuals, groups, organisations or society.” There is a political, organizational story in that process.

You know stories. You are simulated by stories about your discipline, stories within your own research, stories about the impact of your research, stories translating what you have learned, unlearned and relearned, stories of meaning making as these link you to your mentors and to your students. You know stories also as sparking mental simulation, creating opportunities for learning, as the Heaths point out, by using story telling to make space for listeners’ rehearsals of cognitive and affective processes necessary for problem solving and mental practice – the next best thing to doing.

Story sets out how that “I” thinks in, through, because of (insert other prepositions here) some persons or contexts or experiences that the “I” invites into the story through all of the sticky principles – the complexity set forth by simple and concrete means, with developments within the core story that are unexpected, credible and emotional, if also embellishments. Story allows listeners to belong, also, to the story.

Telling Stories 1

Teachers in higher education who write about using story as a tool in teaching for learning seem to converge on these three story types offered by Dan and Chip Heath as organizers of stories for teaching and learning:

Connection Plot. Select and develop stories as part of teaching for learning to engage students in stimulating and simulating ways of knowing about disciplinary content, concepts and concerns. This plot aims for bridging of a gap, attending to new ideas and normalizing resistance as a component of learning that comes when beliefs, values and previously gathered information are challenged. Think of connection plot as an arc of Learn – Unlearn – Relearn.

I am, indeed, that college student who was asked to not ask how a chemistry principle related to baking, to not ask whether local farm chemicals had an impact on human biology, and to not ask how the math we just learned could have a statistical use for someone studying cultural anthropology. My high school science teachers used stories – from their lives, about researchers they had studied, about local communities, from newspaper headlines, because of student questions, and within planned presentations as well as spontaneous devices to engage parallel problem-solving when a classroom reached conceptual roadblocks – to connect us to ways of applying and extending the foundational knowledge we studied across STEM courses. These teachers make use of knowing-what in service of knowing-how. Sometimes the stories were woven into presentations – food preparation often in the chemistry class sessions; maths linked to social issues; biology lessons framed by newspaper stories and lives of those within the high school

• Why tell this story? When I teach undergraduate students, I ask them to look for ways of linking what we study to other courses they are taking or have taken, and if not that, then to questions that come with them across the classroom doorway. I collect short writings early in the semester about those connections and questions – based on what they have learned in and about the course so far; I draw on their questions and connections to shape stories for classroom presentations – mine and theirs.
• In teaching Preparing Future Faculty courses – and in working with faculty peers and colleagues – I may shape the story elements as a connection story that invites future faculty to think about why friends from school who were good learners fell away from courses and areas of studies my PFF students now pursue. Seldom do my students characterize those friends who were “leavers” of particular disciplines as not smart or as unmotivated or as disinterested. Nor do they hear my story as exemplifying those characteristics. With connections to storied people, my own future faculty students look for ways to engage learning rather than weed learners, to assemble a range of assignments robust enough for the range of learners motivated to excel. Through their STEM-focused networks like CIRTL – Center for the Integration, Research, Teaching and Learning – they become aware, too, of how disciplines construct stories of success: Telling Stories about Engineering: Group Dynamic and Resistance to Diversity, for example.

Telling Stories 2

Creativity Plot. Think of Newton, the apple and gravity. Think of Alan Turing or Ada Lovelace and the guy down the street who created the app you use every day – all those who build from code breaking to create new modes of communication. Imagine how you would cast The Tech and Science behind Little Red Riding Hood. The creativity plot stimulates novel thinking, problem solving, seeing something with new eyes; engages us in undoing troublesome knots and enacting break throughs to levels of meaning only implicit without the work of critical reflection, dialogue, and examination. All of which come from leaning into a story, traveling and unraveling as if that character and then entering into thinking as oneself with others as part of unraveling our very own complex, wicked, ill-defined problems.

And, yes, of course, I am that advocate of engage learning who as an upper division student dropped – never to enroll and complete the course – an undergraduate course that included group testing components. On its own, this isn’t a great story for either the first year undergraduates or the graduate students and postdocs in PFF courses. It might be an interesting narrative given the ways and whys of learning in either set of courses. But the story’s not about the test, it’s about:

• not trusting the people who were my classmates, who would – some of them – become part of a class team with me;
• learning about the group test in the first week of a course – but not doing any work that week that required working in groups, not for discussion of readings, not to dig into a case study, not to take an early quiz;
• knowing some of the folks in the class from being part of the campus student leadership “hierarchy” and wondering whether it would be safe in the group to show my personal dissents – whether to the topic or the course.

So why tell this story on the first day of a class?

For my graduate courses, it’s a reminder to them – and to me – that I know being in a new learning environment is scary. And learning about learning tends to be newer and scarier than learning about teaching for PFF students. It’s a moment from which to build trust during the first 15 minutes of the course as I engage them in a course-specific problem-solving activity that happens in groups with follow up individual reflection on the group activity then cross-group conversation about the topic then a full class interactive presentation in which we all discuss what learning will look like in this course. Telling this story is also about letting my future faculty students know that I did talk with my own teacher about my discomfort with group testing – without that conversation I wouldn’t have gotten to the critical reflection about what shaped my fears. With that conversation I began talking about learning and teaching in a way that opened me to thinking about creating a culture of learning in every classroom.

For my undergraduate courses it’s also about building trust, but also to introduce a discussion about how people – in general – learn, it moves us into discussions about learning – definitionally, developmentally, cognitively and affectively, and into acknowledging the roles of tension, conflict, and confusion in processes of learning.

Telling Stories 3

Challenge Plot. The Heaths set out David and Goliath as the classic example of a plot involving daunting obstacles and characters who preserver, take action, dismantle barriers so that something significantly wrong is righted, so that dangers of telling single stories are replaced by a weave of multiple, simultaneous, overlapping stories – which provide a stronger foundation for meeting next challenges (and a foundation that itself might well be further challenged, reshaped by new stories).

Tags: learning, sticky teaching, success